Apathy Sketchpad

I’ve just read a post about “what prayer is” on Why Don’t You, which was inspired by a post about “prayer in schools” on GodBeGone. Heather sees prayer as “special pleading” to God, which seems pretty reasonable to me. Obviously it depends on what you hope to achieve by the prayer, but many people seem to want to effect a direct change in the material world purely by praying. My basis for this is mostly Christianity, as I’ve seen most of it and they mostly pray in English. Almost every Christian prayer I’ve ever heard has made specific requests of the recipient: deliver us from evil, say, or strangely, from the Hail Mary, that she prays for the person praying to her. (Presumably this is the Catholic equivalent of having ‘contacts’.) There are loads of studies of prayer used as a medical intervention (all of the properly done ones reporting that prayer doesn’t help, and that telling someone they’re being prayed for makes things worse). And then there’s this, from the Telegraph:

An 11-year-old girl died from diabetes after her parents prayed for her recovery rather than calling for medical assistance.

…

[Local police chief] Mr Vergin said the couple, who run a coffee shop in Wausau, had blamed her death on their lack of faith.

There’s a picture in the article of the parents and the girl, and the caption is just brilliant:

Dale and Leilani Neumann say they are not ‘crazy religious people’.
But after Madeline died, they prayed that she might be resurrected

There are churches which routinely endorse this kind of thing, and they (like Madeline’s parents) are protected by specific “healing by prayer” legislation. The whole thing is covered in more detail (and it somehow manages to get worse) at Pharyngula.

Personally, I see this as just one part of a much larger problem: people genuinely seem to think that praying will achieve something. This is one of the most dangerous aspects of Christianity, and it’s also one of the stupidest. Let’s be ridiculously generous, and grant these people the irrational and bizarre assumption that there is an almighty god who watches us and has little else to do but interfere with our lives. So what kind of a god is he?

The conventional Christian wisdom (and I use the word “wisdom” somewhat figuratively) is that he is all-loving. In which case, it would seem to me, he would simply cure these people without being asked — at least, if he thought that was the right thing to do. The idea that he is omnipotent but has no initiative somehow doesn’t ring true to me. He did, we’re led to believe, create the universe, after all. I can’t imagine who would have suggested that. (I’m not completely sure it was a wise move, in hindsight.)

It’s also fairly well accepted by those who think he exists at all that he has a Divine Plan. Usually the plan is held to be ineffable — that is, that no human ever can or will understand it. Let’s again be ridiculously generous and grant them the assumption that it is possible for something to be Beyond Human Understanding — that is, simultaneously impossible to understand and true. I would have said when something can’t be understood, it’s probably because it’s bollocks, but let’s assume for now that that isn’t true. So now the theory is that God, who is all-loving and omnipotent, has devised a Divine Plan, which presumably therefore represents the very best course of history that the human race could possibly take. We’re left to assume that things like the holocaust were strictly necessary for some unimaginably greater good further down the line, or perhaps for avoiding some even more terrible event which has now been averted. If so, thankyou God, although I don’t really see how it was your call. If all of the above is true, then it would seem to me that God would be an idiot to mess about with his Plan just because a load of humans who don’t understand it in the first place ask him to. (It would also suggest that God isn’t going to let a little thing like “free will” interfere with the Plan, so now all forms of action become pointless. Why take the girl to the doctor if God’s already decided how this ends? It also implies that murderers shouldn’t really be punished because anything and everything they do is sanctioned in God’s Plan. This is a really dangerous train of thought to stay on too long.)

And as if all of the above was somehow insufficiently absurd, when one prayer doesn’t work, they start getting more people to join in. People genuinely organise huge gatherings for prayer, and the Pope not so long ago tried to instigate a 24-hour “shift” prayer to rid the church of corruption. I ask you — if God is all powerful, then surely he can take a suggestion once, evaluate it, and implement it or not without having thousands of other people pester him about it as well? He’s not your MP, and even if he was, I’d like to think he was smart enough to realise that almost all petitions are a moronic waste of time. The merit of an idea isn’t a function of how many people support it (nor is the reverse true) and in any case God has never been known for his commitment to democracy. He tends, at least in the literature, to prefer a kind of auto-theocracy, where he rules all and anyone who doesn’t follow his rules is burned horribly or drowned or turned to condiment or something.

It’s moronic. And the problem is, that nobody in this story did anything but try to help. Her parents genuinely thought that if they sat at home and didn’t call the doctor for long enough, Madeline would get better. Then she died, and they genuinely thought that if they sat around the body and wanted it hard enough that Madeline would come back to life. (There is a sentence which can apply to multiple news stories.) In real life, their actions are unjustifiable. They were negligent and they imposed their ideology on a vulnerable young girl who trusted them and was too young to understand what was happening to her. The same is true of Jehovah’s Witnesses who apply their religious rules to their children, and the child dies where a blood transfusion would have saved them. It also applies to Daily Mail readers who think that vaccinations are harmful and their children — and other people’s — die of preventable diseases. I nearly added “worse still” before “other people’s” but I thought better of that. “Your” children aren’t yours. They’re theirs. They’re no more “yours” than “your” friends or “your” parents are. It’s an indicator of relationship, not possession, and anybody other than yourself, regardless of relationship, mustn’t be subjected to your delusions if that puts them at risk. But if you believe it, like this guy does, they absolutely did the right thing.

This article, from the universally accepted standard source for anti-vaccination nutjobs that is The Daily Mail, has quotes like this:

I’ve done a lot of research, mainly on the internet, and I’m doing what I think is the right thing for her.

You’re wrong. The world is complicated and nobody is expected to understand the whole lot. That’s why governments have advisers. Delegate this decision to someone more qualified.

Or this:

I’ve been called selfish by doctors and health visitors. In fact, I’m more vigilant than most parents – I’ve chosen to educate myself about immunity and how to deal with diseases, rather than blindly hand over responsibility to the State or doctors.

You are selfish and slightly moronic to boot. Do the smart thing and trust medical experts on medical matters. You can answer all their questions about your area of expertise, which is probably the lives of Katie And Peter.

Or this:

If Max did get measles I’d give him a boost with Vitamin C and Vitamin A from cod liver oil. If we have a second child, there will be no vaccinations at all.

You are negligent parents and should not have children — you’re literally no different to the Neumanns, except with fish oil substituted for prayer.

The problem is that even the best of intentions are worthless if you’re too ignorant to make the right decision. Some people say there are two kinds of truth: “scientific” truth, and “religious truth”. The former, they say, affects the world we live in, and the latter guides us in spiritual matters. Usually these people are either trying to protect their religious convictions from proper scrutiny, or else are trying to distance themselves from people like Madeline’s parents. The problem is that you end up saying “religious things can’t be understood, and aren’t a useful basis for real-world decisions, but they are nevertheless true“. To my mind, you are by that point using the word “true” in such a weak sense that it loses all meaning.

I prefer an approach that says “you go ahead and believe in your god, but only if you recognise that it’s irrational and don’t inflict it on anyone else”. I think about the universe, of course I do. Life is incredibly strange compared to everything else we know about science, and it seems to require a special origin to explain it. Personally, I tend to assume that “life” is a property of the universe which operates on some tiny level (say, the quantum randomness) and consciousness is an emergent phenomenon which appears when this ‘control’ is placed in a system as complex as a living human brain. It seems plausible to me, and it appeals to my kind of mind. (I like emergent complexity. It’s elegant and the neatest way to explain the existence of complexity at all. I’d hate to have the kind of mind that prefers to substitute God for a difficult question.) But since I’ve no evidence, I don’t put too much stock in that hypothesis, not that I can think of a situation it would affect anyway. That is a healthy and reasonable approach to take. If people said “I think there’s a god, and I think he’s against it, but I can’t be sure so you’d best get that transfusion anyway” then that would be reasonable.

Free speech is important, but I think we badly need a new crime of causing death by misinformation. Deaths from measles rose by infinity percent between 2005 and 2006 after the whole stupid autism “controversy” kicked off, and it’s in no small part because people like the Daily Mail publishing stories like this one. In principle, this would mean a lot of churches would be liable too, but really it would just mean that they’d have to be careful about what they preached — which I think would be a good thing.

It could save lives, and in so many more ways than by simply preventing deaths.

A little while ago, Camelot announced that if you play the lottery online, they’ll email you to let you know if you won. I don’t really like the idea of subscribing to a lottery and then being told by email how you did. That would seem to extract all the fun bits from it — buying the tickets, checking the numbers… Surely without that you’re either addicted to gambling or else you’re making the least shrewd financial move ever. It’s worth pointing out before Dave Hitt turns up and starts ranting about nannies and inventing new words for what kind of freedom hating jerk I am that I don’t actually think this should be illegal; just that it’s dumb. My problem with emailing lottery winners is that I get loads of emails telling me I’ve won various lotteries, and this is going to make that far, far worse (and the real emails will probably be hidden as spam). I realised this within ten seconds of seeing the TV advert for the new service, so it’s reasonable to expect Camelot to figure it out. And today, just like I said would happen, I received this:

From: Mr Steven Mark <camelot_group01@yahoo.de>
Date: Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 2:20 PM
Subject: You Have WON

You have emerged Winner from this Weeks Draws. Contact

Mr Steven Mark.
PROCESSING DEPARTMENT
Email:camelot_group02@yahoo.de
Tel:+447031908108

For Claims Of Funds, Provide the Following Information in your Email
NAMES:
Sex:
Address:
Age
City:
State:
Postcode:
Country
Occupation:
Tel:
Nationality

BATCH Nº.: 2008UKL-01
Amount Won: £1.8million pounds
Date Of Draw:April 24th 2008.

Sincerely,
Mrs. Dianne Thompson
Online Coordinator

Why do people never listen to me?

I do like that I won the Thursday draw, and that Camelot’s email runs through Yahoo! Germany.

Click here for answer.

I’ve uploaded an album of photos to Facebook, which consists mainly of stupid signs I have seen about my various travels. You may have a look at it if you like, even if you don’t have a Facebook account. (You’ll need an account to view and post tags and comments, though of course you can still comment here.)

One or two have been on the blog before, but they haven’t been on Facebook so I included them anyway.

The law that forces the eldest daughter of a monarch to make way for her younger brother in the succession could be abolished under new equality legislation. Ministers want to give women equal rights to succeed the throne, ending the rule of primogeniture set down under the provisions of the 1701 Act of Settlement.

…

Vera Baird, the Solicitor General tasked with helping to steer the new equality bill through the Commons, said that the right of males to succeed ahead of their older sisters was “unfair” and “a load of rubbish”.

It’s worth pointing out, though, that Baird may be slightly mental, because…

She added: “I have always thought that what we have to do with the Royal family is integrate them as far as possible into the human race.”

Mrs Baird also wants to repeal the law that bans the heir to the throne from marrying a Catholic. She said: “The ban on marrying Catholics should be abolished too, because that is discriminatory.”

…

Liberal Democrat equality spokeswoman Lynne Featherstone… said that she believed the reform would receive cross-party support. “We can’t have a law that is meant to fight Government discrimination and injustice and allow a blatantly sexist law on Royal succession to continue,” she said.

These are people who can arbitrarily pardon criminals, dismiss governments, command the army, and run our Established Christian church whose ministers get a free say in the running of the country on the basis that they were born into the right family, and you’re concerned that that might be sexist?!

This country is sodding mental.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the Fraudulent Mediums Act, its imminent repeal, and the proposed replacement. The gist of it is as follows: the existing Act superseded the perhaps mildly archaic Witchcraft Act of 1735 (which in turn succeeded the whole “burn the witch!” nonsense), and essentially states that it is illegal to offer psychic services that don’t work unless the psychic decides that they don’t want to be prosecuted: all they have to do is say that they genuinely believe that they can contact the dead and there’s really nothing much an angry punter can do about that. The idea was to only prosecute those mediums who intended to defraud, but as a result, almost nobody was ever convicted under the Act. The new law will be a more general set of rules, that will effectively shift the burden of proof to the person who thinks they see dead people, which is of course exactly where it should be. The new regulations aren’t aimed at psychics specifically, but they do affect them. Article 5, rule 3 discusses

Commercial practices which are likely to materially distort the economic behaviour only of a clearly identifiable group of consumers who are particularly vulnerable to the practice or the underlying product because of their mental or physical infirmity, age or credulity in a way which the trader could reasonably be expected to foresee

It reminds me a little of catch-22: psychics will be allowed to sell their services only to those consumers who aren’t credulous enough to want them.

The talk mostly centres around whether or not this is an overreaction. It’s clear that many people are conned into losing a lot of money to unscrupulous mediums, but equally it’s generally agreed that it would be in some way a shame to lose, and a problem to litigate, all forms of nonsense. There doesn’t seem to be any practical way to say you can pretend to have psychic powers but only if you don’t sell your services to the vulnerable — it’s hard to imagine what definition of “vulnerable” would fail to include someone that gullible. I feel like this is something I should have an opinion about but I’m finding it increasingly difficult to give a shit.

I’m more-or-less always in favour of generalised laws over specific ones: a well-written generalised law can not only catch a crook, it can catch an entire class of crook, and it can catch a whole raft of future crooks committing crimes that haven’t even been invented yet — or even common crimes that haven’t been identified as crimes yet. That these laws have unforeseen consequences is their greatest strength.

A group called the “Spiritualist Workers’ Association” (really) is predictably angry about this. They say, and this is really my primary reason for not giving a shit if their whole industry gets banned,

It would seem that saying that it is a scientific experiment in which the outcome cannot be satisfactorily predicted is one way to stay within the legislation. Another is to class it as entertainment.

…

Mediums and healers believe they are communicating with Spirit. We do not believe we are conducting a scientific experiment. To have to stand up and say so is a denial of our beliefs. It is also sending out a message to the public that we do not believe what we are saying and doing. If we don’t have the courage to stand up and say that we believe what we are doing then how can we expect the public to take us seriously?

Oh, grow up. You don’t believe any such thing. If you believed in it, then you’d have done some scientific tests long ago, proved it, collected a million dollars from James Randi and a Nobel Prize, and then gone right ahead and made an advert saying “Madame Spurious is scientifically proven to predict the future! 95% accurate in trials!” This would also protect you from any liability under the new regulations. There’s no downside — I have emailed the SWA to suggest this approach, and I’ll let you know if and when they reply. (There’s always a chance that, like some of the more demented homeopaths and other quacks, they believe that it’s true but won’t register in a scientific test, but you can’t legislate around the beliefs of morons, even if it was your crappy school system that did for them — seriously, if science education was better then a lot of these problems would go away.) Essentially, they’re arguing that because they think their service is effective, that should be enough for punters, the government, and the courts. I find it hard to imagine the anarchy that would erupt if all industries were regulated that way, but I certainly wouldn’t like to end up in a hospital in that country — not least because these same psychics also dabble in a bit of so-called “psychic healing”: a trade where you find someone who is seriously ill and probably scared and out of options, and you charge them for a cure that even a child could tell you doesn’t work. The contempt I hold for these people is more than enough that I would actually be quite amused to see them all imprisoned.

The ringleader of all this seems to be “Carole McEntee-Taylor, a spiritual healer and general secretary of the newly founded Spiritual Workers’ Association”. She further demonstrated that they’re all a bunch of fakes when she said this, in a speech to her new Association:

Like many people we knew nothing about the proposed changes in legislation until we read a letter from Stephen Watson in the Psychic News in November. We were extremely concerned about the changes, but also that most people in the spiritual movement didn’t seem to know about it.

I can see how that would be concerning. (They really should have cottoned on by now to the fact that unless they start complaining the week before the story breaks they’ll get nothing but sarcastic responses. Honestly, these people can’t even read the past.)

As mediums, when you are giving messages you believe that you are talking to the loved ones of those who have passed over and that when you sit in meditation you are talking to your guides. As healers you believe that when you are giving healing you are channelling energy from spirit. Do you believe that when you give messages, readings and healing you are conducting a scientific experiment or that it is just entertainment? OK. So if we all believe that what we are doing is communicating in some way with Spirit why shouldn’t we say so?

Because it’s not true! What part of that is hard to accept? If GlaxoSmithKline believe that their new drug cures the common cold they don’t get to say it works until they’ve proven it. If Sony think their new TV works but it turns out that it doesn’t, they’re still liable. What the fuck makes you lot so special? Apparently nothing:

If we believe in what we are saying then why should we be made to deny these beliefs? If we believe in what we are doing then why should we feel that we have to hide? If any other group was made to stand up publicly and deny their beliefs there would be an outcry. Why should we be any different?

This is a common brain failure: it would of course be a terrible thing if anyone was made to deny their beliefs (or lack thereof). It happens, mainly in Islamic countries, and it’s just awful. But this isn’t the same as that: this is simply saying that if you want to take people’s money on the basis of those beliefs you should have some evidence to back them up with. That’s not unreasonable in the least. And I bet McEntee-Taylor would be the first to complain if her husband was killed by a maverick doctor with a hunch.

The SWA will continue to campaign to be the governing body because we believe that the best way to carry on working for spirit is to stand up and say so. We are proud to be spiritual workers. We are proud of our beliefs and we will not deny them. We will do this for our children and their children and for all those people who do believe.

Or “victims”, as they’re alternatively known. Putting a group of people who think they have psychic powers in charge of regulating psychics sounds like the thinking of Havelock Vetinari to me — which works on the Discworld but here would be almost literally the blind leading the blind.

This is, of course, just a symptom of the far wider problem that people seem these days to think that it’s okay, even commendable, to believe in total bullshit and act all offended if anyone should presume to question it, but the utter hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty and vacuity demonstrated by McEntee-Taylor and her band of merry morons is so offensive that I think it warrants a special mention.

McEntee-Taylor is trying to justify her nonsense by calling “spiritualism” a religion. She thinks that if it’s labelled “religion” then that makes it okay to scam people. For my part, I’m positively looking forward to the first time someone uses the new regulations to prosecute a religious organisation for soliciting donations on the basis of totally unfounded myths — unless of course it has a religious exemption. I didn’t see one but it wouldn’t surprise me much. That kind of exemption would be pretty moronic — if you need it then you shouldn’t have it — but such is the over-privileged state religious nonsense finds itself in.

What can you do that involves a gallon of apple juice, a pint of coffee, whipping cream, berries, orange, grapefruit or lemon juice, and olive oil? If you said “round off a nice meal”, you were very, very wrong.

Source: Science Based Medicine blog.

Artois do a nice little gift thing where you get four bottles of Stella and a branded glass in a fairly nice box. I got one for Christmas, and I kept the box. I also kept the glass, but that’s not needed for this. I drank the beer, so I had to replace that. I also bought one other key component. This was the result:

I think this could catch on. It is becoming increasingly clear that I am a marketing genius.

I was just asked this question in a survey online:

My response was to laugh out loud, copy-paste it into a blog post, and then close the window. I suspect the number of people who responded much the same way will never be reported.

Surveys are weird, though. I was once phoned up by a guy asking me questions about something he called the “rugby uninen world cup”, where “uninen” was pronounced “U, 9, N”. The bulk of the survey was him listing corporations and me telling him that I don’t know whether or not they sponsored the world cup. Then there were questions with numerical answers, which went like this, “how many times a week do you watch sports?”

“Zero.”

“Two?”

“Zero.”

“Two?”

“Zero.”

“One?”

“Deal.”

Then he asked me if I had a Visa card, which I do. He said, “Do you know what is,” (he was Indian; I don’t know if he was in England or not but he definitely was Indian,) “actually, I will tell you what is a Visa card. It is a card that you use to buy things and then you pay back the money at the end of the month,” to which I replied, “no, it isn’t.” That’s a credit card. Visa is a brand name. I have a Visa card that operates on nothing like that principle.

This sort of thing, I think, explains why we have so many products that nobody could possibly ever want.

I am normally the first to roll their eyes when those ridiculous “post your desktop” threads appear on internet forums, but I thought my current desktop might amuse you:

I can’t be sure if it was inspired by this comic (I don’t know how my mind works any more than you do), but I assume it was.

See also:

• I Know You Disagree; Shut Up Whining
• Fuck Grapefruit Discussion Thread
• Make Your Own Fruit Graph